We hope you have had a wonderful holiday season! Now, it is January and that time when many of us reassess our busy lives and think about what we want to accomplish or do to balance our lives during the next year.With that in mind, we have some New Year ideas and exercises for you!
Read Our Book: Reboot Your Life: Energize Your Career and Life by Taking a Break is selling well and available on Amazon.com and in bookstores. It is a great guidebook to giving yourself the “gift of time” and is full of helpful ideas and stories of what others have done to focus their lives and bring more balance.
Attend a Retreat: Our next retreat is coming right up in Santa Fe January 10-12 and we have three others in 2014 scheduled for April, August, and October in Brooklyn, Sag Harbor, and Cape Cod, respectively. The retreats are a way to work within a small group setting, and with us one-on-one, to discover what it is that you really want to do, and make the plans actionable.
Try our Exercises: Then there are the exercises that really get you motivated. We always encourage daily journaling and have published a Journal for Inspiration just for this purpose! The Circle Goals Exercise also one of our favorites – the four of us do this each year and share with each other. Unlike New Year’s Resolutions that often get forgotten after two weeks, Circle Goals help you to change your life and bring it back into harmony and balance by providing a focus on priorities, with actionable steps.
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| Sample Circle Goals |
- Draw a circle and divide it into 6 even pie-like slices. The equal pie slices are to remind you to give equal weight to each aspect of your life, if not in time at least in mental thought.
- In each slice, write an area or category of your life that you want to focus on for the next year. Examples might be: Financial, Health and Exercise, Creativity, Career, Friends and Family, Spirituality, Romantic Relationships, Renovating the House, Writing a Book, etc.
- Write 5 measurable and obtainable goals you can accomplish under each category. Be specific and make sure you can see results at the end of the year. For example, under Financial, you might write: Put all financial information online by June; or under Creativity, it might be: Take an art course from the local university this year…You get the picture!
It may take you a couple of hours, or you might want to go back to it within a few days tomake changes as the process gets you thinking. When you are finished, go back and pickone goal that is most important to accomplish this year from each category and write that down and put it somewhere as a reminder, to look at occasionally. After 6 months, pull out your Circle Goals again and review it, but make no changes, then look at it again at the end of the year and reflect on all you have changed in your life. We never get everything in our Circle done, but we get so much more than we thought and we have given priority to those things that we say are important, but never seem to have the time to do.